Results from the 2026 Nationals – Other Single Red Varieties

Announcing the Results from the 2026 National Wine Awards of Canada

The 2026 Nationals took place in Niagara, Ontario from June 12th to 18th. Today, we are pleased to announce the winners in the Other Single Red and White varieties as well as Gewürztraminer and Viognier categories. Category results will be rolling out throughout the rest of July, concluding with the Winery of the Year announcement on July 31st. We hope that you will stay tuned to follow the results!

Other Single Red Varieties

Category Overview by John Szabo MS

Go straight to the winners.

Other Red Single Varieties

Call it the misfit bin, the experimental annex, the corner of the cellar where Canadian winemakers go rogue: the Other Red Single Varieties category exists precisely because our industry keeps planting grapes that don’t yet merit their own line item. This year 31 entries produced 16 medals—a 51.6% hit rate—broken down as 4 gold, 5 silver and 7 bronze, a modest 1.29% slice of the competition’s overall medal total, befitting a category built from leftovers and long shots, at an average price approaching $46 a bottle.

The story in 2026 is once again anchored in the South Okanagan’s heat. Two of the four golds went to carménère—Moon Curser’s 2022 bottling and Phantom Creek’s 2022 Becker Vineyard version, the latter a serious $113.85 statement wine—while Tightrope’s 2023 Barbera from Naramata Bench and Rosehall Run’s 2024 improbable but delicious Tempranillo from Prince Edward County rounded out the gold tier, the lone Ontario representative among the top medals. British Columbia otherwise dominates this category by volume, claiming 12 of 16 medals to Ontario’s three and Nova Scotia’s one, with the Okanagan Valley the clear epicentre of experimentation.

Moon Curser Vineyards, the Osoyoos winery that built its reputation on unconventional plantings and once won Best Performing Small Winery honours for exactly this kind of daring, again proved the category’s most reliable performer with three medals. It’s worth noting that petit verdot this year graduated into its own dedicated competition category, leaving this year’s “others” leaning further into true varietal exotica.

There’s no tidy hectare figure to cite for a category defined by fragmentation—individual BC plantings of carménère, tempranillo, touriga nacional and barbera each cover only a handful of hectares—but that’s rather the point. This is Canadian wine’s laboratory, where a producer’s willingness to gamble on a grape nobody else grows occasionally pays off spectacularly, as Phantom Creek and Moon Curser proved again this year.

And the winners are…